Stefania Di Filippo
"Dream Land"
Favourite Camera
Fuji S5 Pro, Fuji X100s, Fuji X-E5
Favourite Photographer
Luigi Ghirri, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Garbiele Basilico, Todd Hido, Stephen Shore, Alex Webb, Alec Soth
What makes a good photograph?
I believe what makes me a good photographer is my ability to look beyond what is immediately visible. I am interested in the space between reality and perception, and in the traces that places, objects and people leave behind. I tend to work slowly, returning to subjects over time and allowing a project to develop through observation rather than forcing a predetermined narrative. Photography, for me, is a way of questioning reality as much as representing it. I also bring a strong awareness of composition and visual rhythm to my work, but I consider technique a means rather than an end. What matters most to me is creating images that remain open to interpretation and can communicate something beyond the moment in which they were made.
Dream Land is a long-term personal project about the relationship between memory and place. Although all the images were made in Sicily, my native island, the series is not intended as a documentary portrait of a territory. Instead, I explore the landscape as an inner space, shaped by memory, distance and imagination. I began photographing these places while I was still living in Sicily, knowing that I would soon leave. That awareness of an impending departure became part of the work itself. Over time, and from a distance, the island gradually transformed into an interior landscape: a collection of fragments, sensations and images in which the real and the remembered constantly overlap. Through landscapes, bodies, architecture and traces of human presence, I wanted to capture a suspended sense of time—something between presence and absence, belonging and distance, reality and dream. The photographs are not meant to reconstruct a place as it objectively exists, but to evoke the way a place persists within us after we have left it. Dream Land is ultimately an exploration of how memory alters the places we belong to, and how those places continue to inhabit us even when we are far away.
